Trudeaumania
Page 30
Pierre Trudeau gave his acceptance speech just before midnight Ottawa time—delivered in his now-famous monotone, devoid of any of the emotion normally on display at such moments. He thanked the leaders of the other parties and Canadians themselves for participating in the democratic process and fulfilling their responsibility as citizens. “For me it was a great adventure of discovery,” he said.
For all of us I think it has been a period of self-discovery. We now know things about this country which we did not know two months ago. The election has been fought in a mood of optimism and of confidence in our future. We have seen an unexpected upsurge of interest and involvement. But it was also a mood of tolerance. There is a strong desire amongst Canadians not only to make it possible for both language groups and our many cultural communities to coexist in all parts of the country without assimilation, but to take advantage of our diversity. We must intensify the opportunities for learning about each other.14
It was an anodyne speech, plainly meant to heal. The prime minister may well have been impressed with some Canadians’ “mood of tolerance.” But the fact remains that he had been the object of the worst smear campaign in Canadian electoral history, the pretext for the worst separatist riot, the recipient of credible death threats, and a witness each day to the intolerance of hecklers, bigots, and provocateurs in every Canadian province. Trudeau knew the importance of being gracious in victory. He was not about to kick off his first majority mandate with gloating. It fell to Quebec Liberal Party executives Claude Frenette and I.G. Giguere to state what Trudeau would not. The Liberal sweep meant that Quebecers had rejected the deux nations theory along with separatism, they asserted.15 “Liberal organizers also feel that by winning 55 Quebec seats as opposed to the Conservatives’ four,” Southam correspondent Lisa Balfour reported, “they have administered a good, solid slap in the face to Premier Daniel Johnson.”16
No issue in the campaign had been as salient to voters as deux nations—not even the idea of the “Just Society” that Trudeau himself had invoked and his organization had so deftly sloganized. “The issue is Canada,” Trudeau had said throughout the campaign. And Canadians had drawn precisely the right inference: Was Canada one nation or two? “In the first year of its second century Canada voted yesterday to continue to grow as one nation, indivisible, free of prejudice and stronger in inter-racial harmony than ever before,” answered the Vancouver Sun. “It rose to the tough but inspired leadership of a French-Canadian patriot at a time of crisis which he best understood and was most competent to solve. History may say that without him, the victory for national unity could not have been won.”17 Quite right, asserted Toronto Star columnist Peter C. Newman in his first post-election column. “Canadians have told Trudeau to settle the national unity crisis.”18
Across Canada, editorials and op-ed pages expressed the same mix of exultation and relief. “The overall results, it is to be hoped, will put an end to the legend of Trudeaumania,” said the Globe and Mail. “The Prime Minister has been given the mandate he sought to build a unified Canada in which the linguistic and cultural ambitions of both French and English-speaking Canadians will be respected in a federation that is hospitable to all its citizens, regardless of their racial origin.”19 The Toronto Star agreed. “Canada was the winner in Quebec,” said the Star. “This was the clearest confrontation we have ever had between the ideal of a united Canada of all Canadians and that of a largely autonomous, though not independent, Quebec state.”20 The Halifax Chronicle Herald asserted that the Liberal “triumph” in Quebec demonstrated that separatists were “a noisy but politically insignificant faction, and that a majority of Quebecers want to remain Canadians, in a united Canada.”21 An Ottawa Citizen editorial observed that “Mr. Trudeau can properly interpret the result as support for his view of federalism.”22 Syndicated Southam columnist Charles Lynch added, “The outlook on the national unity problem could scarcely be brighter in the light of the Trudeau mandate.”23
Significantly, editorialists writing for Quebec’s English-language dailies—men and women with daily exposure to the nuances of Quebec politics—understood why English Canadians had welcomed Trudeau’s victory so enthusiastically, but they expressed their own reaction with more reserve. “Mr. Trudeau has been able to draw to himself the country’s hopes for national unity,” said the Montreal Gazette. “These hopes have become concentrated in him in an almost mythical sense. Mr. Trudeau has offered a united Canada, not only by hope and by dream, but almost an act of will.”24 The Sherbrooke Daily Record agreed. “Apparently the thought uppermost in the minds of most Canadians is the need for preserving national unity, something that the Prime Minister believes can best be nurtured by a strong central government at Ottawa,” it echoed. “And judging by the outcome in the voting of Quebec province the majority of the French-speaking electors agree with him.”25
French-language editorialists in Quebec reacted to the Liberal victory philosophically, observing that Trudeau’s challenge to the nationalist idea of deux nations had not prevented Quebecers from voting for him overwhelmingly. Op-eds in Le Droit and L’Action expressed reservations about Trudeau but acknowledged that the return of majority government would at least bring “stability” and “freedom” to Parliament.26 La Presse attributed Trudeau’s coast-to-coast victory to Canadians’ fascination with the man himself. “What is essential now is to use this victory for the common good and to initiate an era of uninterrupted progress, of stability in harmony,” it concluded.27 Writing in Le Soleil, journalist Mario Cardinal correctly noted that Trudeau’s majority victory in Quebec was about to complicate Daniel Johnson’s life.28 Claude Ryan was particularly gracious in the wake of the Liberal victory. “The Quebec people did not explicitly approve of the constitutional theory of Mr. Trudeau,” he wrote in Le Devoir. “Nevertheless, they have confidence in it after having had ample opportunity to examine his constitutional opinions.”29
Quebec sovereignists responded predictably to Trudeau’s 1968 victory. “His platform had no substantial political content,” René Lévesque wrote, “a few pious generalizations about a juster society; a couple of jokes at the expense of Conservative leader, Robert Stanfield; and nothing more. Trudeau only had to present himself as an elegant receptacle into which Canada could pour all its hidden hopes, among them the sneaking wish to see French Quebec put in its place. The unspoken but fiercely evident slogan that floated in the air everywhere was ‘Keep Quebec Quiet!’”30
Today, nearly fifty years later, Trudeaumania is commonly understood to have been the beginning of something—the country’s coming of age, Canadians’ embrace of political modernity (including secularism, pluralism, bilingualism, and multiculturalism), the genesis of the Trudeau epoch, of course, and of Canada’s constitutional odyssey. For Canadians enamoured of Pierre Trudeau’s vision of Canada, the adjectives that attach themselves to this historical flashpoint are almost all forward-looking and hopeful: new, fresh, confident, proud, buoyant, optimistic. For Trudeau’s conservative critics, Trudeaumania also marks a historic fork in the road—the moment when, in the words of David Frum, “the peace, stability and comparative prosperity” of mid-1960s Canada was “despoiled” out of “ignorance and arrogance,” requiring three subsequent prime ministers to clean up “the wreckage.”31
But Trudeaumania was also the end of something. It was the end of one Canadian’s quest to figure out what made his country tick. (No wonder Canadians imagine Pierre Trudeau as the country’s iconic loner, paddling his canoe serenely on flat water.)
The project of reimagining Canada was Pierre Trudeau’s intellectual obsession practically from the moment he returned to Montreal from his studies and travel abroad. In Cité libre in the 1950s and especially in his hard-hitting polemics of the early 1960s, Trudeau applied himself to perfecting a liberal constitutional theory of Canadian federalism that would undermine what he perceived as the separatist drift in Quebec nationalist thought. This was no mere academic enterprise—though when he
imagined a life spent writing and teaching in Montreal, Trudeau might well have wished it to be. It was a practical plan to save Canada from a fate that its own history had made almost inevitable. It bears repeating: Trudeau knew that his nationalist adversaries in Quebec were right about the injustices French Canadians had suffered historically. Indeed, when he fumed in 1961 that “the French Canadians had the bad grace to decline assimilation,” he was expressing his own youthful nationalist ire.
Seen in the context of a world decolonizing at breakneck speed in the sixties, when Fidel Castro and other radicals were the standard-bearers of national salvation, Trudeau’s formula for saving Canada was prudent and practical. “What I am thinking of,” said Trudeau, “is a bill of rights which will guarantee French rights across the country. If you say the government of Quebec alone represents French-Canadian aspirations, if you say that to start with, it is clear that my formula won’t work. My formula tries to preserve Canadian unity.” Trudeau’s formula did not envisage a (leftist) revolution or a (rightist) coup d’état. It did not require hyperbole, or arm-twisting, or bait-and-switch demagoguery. Here are my ideas, Trudeau told Canadians. What do you think?
By 1968, Canadians knew that Trudeau was unyielding in his opposition to Quebec nationalists and especially to radical separatists, whom he accused of fomenting “a dictatorship of their minority.” But behind these barbs lay a sharp-eyed diagnosis of both the political origins of Quebec nationalism and its likely trajectory. Political scientists may debate whether Trudeau’s diagnosis was accurate, but they cannot deny that it appeared accurate to many Canadians. Even apart from the revolutionary dogma of Parti pris and the programmatic violence of groups like the FLQ, which most Canadians found abhorrent, Trudeau maintained that moderate nationalist ideas in Quebec like statut particulier and deux nations led directly to “doctrinaire separatism.” When he began saying this publicly in the early 1960s, René Lévesque was a top minister in the Liberal cabinet of Jean Lesage. By 1967, Lévesque was the head of the Mouvement souveraineté-association, a political party dedicated to the principle that “Quebec should become a sovereign state.” Similarly, RIN leader Pierre Bourgault had sought to achieve his separatist goals democratically during Quebec’s 1966 election, but by 1968 he was openly threatening violence against those who “do not believe in our nation.” Quebec nationalists spoke of la nation as inclusive, tolerant, and progressive. But for Pierre Trudeau and other French Canadians who thought as he did, that nation was unwelcoming. Even Canadians sympathetic to Quebec’s national aspirations noticed the incongruity.
In his 1964 brief to the Charlottetown conference, Trudeau had stated that “cold, unemotional rationality” could save the Canadian ship. After 1965—when he, Jean Marchand, and Gérard Pelletier joined the Pearson Liberals—Trudeau personified this cold, unemotional rationality (and for many Canadians he does still). More significantly, he positioned himself as the voice of cautious incrementalism. “You already have enough powers,” he said of Canada’s political elites. “Do a job with them.” His boss, Prime Minister Lester Pearson, agreed. Pearson was a serious student of Canadian history. He understood the pride and dignity that the Quiet Revolution had brought Quebecers. His abiding inclination after taking power in 1963 was to accommodate Quebec’s demands for a new Confederation deal via the Bi and Bi Commission, the Fulton-Favreau formula, and bilateral fora for quiet consultation. But Pearson, and Trudeau with him, ran out of time. Quebec City forced their hands. The Lesage Liberals started the constitutional clock ticking in 1963 when they commissioned exhaustive studies on Quebec’s constitutional options—bequeathing them, in effect, to Daniel Johnson’s Union Nationale in 1966. Ontario premier John Robarts imposed a deadline on the process by calling his interprovincial constitutional conference for November 1967.
Pearson would have preferred not to provoke a “full constitutional confrontation” in 1968, as he himself put it. But push had come to shove. The federal government had to either act or forfeit constitutional leadership to the provinces. Over the course of 1967, Pearson’s own constitutional steering committee adopted Trudeau’s idea of a “charter of human rights”—even though Trudeau himself still hoped that constitutional “tinkering” could be deferred indefinitely. Only in late 1967, after several false starts, did Pearson and his Quebec caucus fall in behind Trudeau’s idea of a charter, and only because Daniel Johnson had concluded that the British North America Act could not be rehabilitated. By then, Trudeau had stepped forward to spearhead the reform of Canadian laws respecting divorce, abortion, and homosexuality. He became a national figure just as the national-unity crisis was peaking. Many Canadians were pleasantly surprised by his leadership skills, his straight talk, and his “gutsiness.” But more important, they understood that Trudeau’s principled defence of his legislative reforms—the need to separate “the sacred and the profane” in a “pluralistic” society—had direct application to the national-unity crisis.
In late January 1968, before he declared himself a candidate for the Liberal leadership, Trudeau told members of the party’s Quebec caucus to keep their minds clear and sharp. “Do not confuse the rights of French Canadians with provincial powers,” he said. Trudeau plainly enjoyed playing the role of the nationalists’ bête noire and even scrapping occasionally with Daniel Johnson, as he did during the televised constitutional conference of February 1968. He continued to pillory nationalist politicians for ghettoizing Quebecers (and for building their own “little empires”) when even the avowed federalists among them, like Marcel Faribault, knew that Quebecers’ birthright was the whole of Canada. But Trudeau was unerringly careful never to attack Quebecers themselves, nor to appear as a federal centralizer “nibbling” at Quebec’s powers and “carrying them off to Ottawa,” as he put it. Any time he suggested that power be ceded to Canadian citizens in a new constitutional arrangement, he explained that this change would require sacrifice from the feds as well as the provinces. Any time he was accused of defending the status quo—by Claude Ryan, most notably—he denied it, insisting that the conversion of Canada into the national homeland of French Canadians as well as English Canadians would require political vision and determined effort. And any time he was praised for putting Quebec in its place, his blunt rejoinder was that Quebec’s place was in Canada. “If people think I would be a good choice for PM because I would be hard on Quebec,” he said, “they had better not vote for me.”
Above all, Trudeau knew better than anyone that his formula for national unity was the starting point for a process that was likely to be long and arduous. It was Marcel Faribault who said, rather blithely, that Canadians could write a new Constitution in six months if they put their minds to it. It was Pierre Trudeau who said that Canadians should be careful what they wished for: once the Constitution was cracked open, there were no guarantees that it could be put back together again.
At the short midnight press conference that followed his 1968 victory address, Prime Minister Trudeau put Canadians on notice once again. Do not imagine that the majority of Quebecers had voted Liberal because they endorsed his vision of Canadian federalism, he warned. Canadians should not delude themselves. The election had not been a referendum on the Constitution. “The election has aroused high expectations among the people of Canada. It will be up to all of us in the government and in parliament to justify these expectations. Throughout this campaign I have insisted that although there are no magic solutions to our problems, we must reform and adapt in many areas—in parliament, in our constitution and in many of our laws, in the development of our economy and in our foreign policy. Much hard work lies ahead.”32
EPILOGUE
TRUDEAUMANIA 2.0
Dynasties are rare in North American politics—in large measure because we rightly think of inherited power as the preserve of monarchies and dictatorships. Only twice in U.S. history have the children of presidents assumed the presidency themselves. John Quincy Adams was elected president in 1824 after his father,
John Adams, had held the office in the years 1797 to 1801. George W. Bush became a two-term president in 2001 after his father, George H.W. Bush, held the office between 1989 and 1993. (As this book goes to press, Americans have before them the unprecedented possibility that the spouse of a former president might become the next occupant of the White House.)
In Canada, the children of politicians have occasionally followed their parents’ example, as in the cases of Ernest Manning’s son Preston, W.A.C. Bennett’s son Bill, Paul Martin’s son Paul, and Daniel Johnson’s sons Pierre-Marc and Daniel. But before October 2015, no child of a Canadian prime minister had ever gone on to hold the country’s highest political office. It was probably inevitable, therefore, that the term Trudeaumania would attach itself to Justin Trudeau’s ascent in Canadian politics. The book on Justin’s extraordinary rise to power has yet to be written—extraordinary not because he has nice abs and a Haida raven tattoo but because he led a moribund third-place party to a stunning majority victory. Yet even at this early stage, less than a year into Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s first mandate, his complex connection to his father’s political legacy has fascinated Canadians—as well it should.
Justin Trudeau has spent much of his life in the fishbowl that is Canadian federal politics. The first of three children born to Pierre and Margaret, on Christmas Day, 1971, he spent most of his childhood at 24 Sussex Drive. The drafty—and by all accounts dilapidated—prime ministerial mansion holds few secrets for him. Given that his parents’ marriage foundered in the mid-1970s when Justin and his brothers, Alexandre and Michel, were small boys, 24 Sussex is surely a place of mixed memories for its current occupant. He knows better than anyone how the public lives of his own children will unfold as they take their place under the media microscope and attend school in the company of RCMP officers, just as he did. He knows, too, the challenges of keeping his private life private and of maintaining some semblance of domestic normalcy under conditions that militate against it.